Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and others to publish a suite of standardised, machine-readable copyright licences that authors can apply to their work to grant some rights to the public by default. Where traditional copyright defaults to "all rights reserved", a CC licence declares "some rights reserved".

The licence suite (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC0, and others) covers most of the choices an author actually wants to make. The contribution is partly legal and partly social. The legal piece is rigorous: each licence is written in a layered form — plain-language summary, full legal text, and machine-readable metadata — so it can be understood, enforced, and indexed at scale. The social piece is the establishment of a vocabulary that makes sharing the default and proprietary use the exception. Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, much of academic open access, and a sizable share of the digital commons are licensed under CC terms.

Creative Commons fits inside the broader free-culture lineage that also produced the GNU GPL and Berne-style copyleft. It extends the open-source argument from software to text, images, music, video, and data, and gives authors a way to opt out of the worst of copyright maximalism without abandoning attribution or share-alike protections. For the parallel society it functions as legal infrastructure: it makes the commons enforceable, gives archival projects a legitimate path to redistribute covered material, and supplies the standard interface between volunteer production and the wider information economy.